After having spent beautiful times in the South of the Lesser Antilles we felt the urge to move a couple of steps North. From Bequia, it was a fairly long day trip to Saint Lucia. We passed the main island of Saint Vincent and sailed all along the coast of Saint Lucia towards its northerly situated Rodney Bay.

That ride took a bumpy start: Just after lifting the anchor in the well protected Admiralty Bay, I set all sails. The sun wasn’t yet up and it was still dark. Leaving the last rocks of Bequia behind, the wind started kicking in. Yuana sailed very fast, but the steering wheel required more and more force for keeping the boat on course. Yuana desperately wanted to turn into the wind. What was wrong?

The wind increased much stronger than expected, 28 knots from the side, 60 to 80 degrees. With all sails all up, we were simply overpowered and far away from a nice balance between wind direction and force versus sail area and trim. So we reefed the first time before the day really started.

Saint Lucia was intended to be a short maintenance and duty free refueling stop on our way to Martinique. We got the boat nicely polished all around and in the cockpit. Then we hired a rigger to check the mast and all relevant parts of the rig. He was very satisfied with the condition of everything, and so were we. The Volvo dealer however had no time for the big engine maintenance. Most workshops are super busy because the yacht charter business moved South after the storm damages in the North. Upon leaving the country we bought 350 liters of duty free fuel at the attractive price of 0.77 Euro per liter.

So, now comes the really important part of this post. During the last weeks I read in the latest master piece of famous sailor Jimmy Cornell. The book carries the title ‘200’000 Miles’ which represents Jimmies vast high sea sailing knowledge, presented in an attractive autobiographical wrapper.

Reading the section about Southern Pacific infected me with the idea to continue our sail towards the Pacific rather then to sail back to Europe. In fact I never liked the idea to sail back into cold Northern European waters, with socks around the feet and gloves around the hands. So this new idea to sail into the Pacific triggered my blueprinting same as when I got infected with the idea of a sailing sabbatical.

By the way, Jimmies most infectious sentence was “We had no pressing reason to bring such a wonderful life to a premature end.” That sentence really made me thinking whether our own trip back to Europe would come to early? Why should we not sail the Pacific?

So we said: „Hey, we are just eight sailing days away from Panama. That means that we are almost at the doorstep to the Pacific, with our own yacht. That is a super huge chance, category ‚once-in-a-lifetime‘! So do something about it!“

We went through very intense weeks of ‚what-if-planning’. I studied the routing recommendations and the wind charts for the Pacific. We studied the administrative needs to cross the Panama channel as well as the selling chances for the boat on ‘the other side’ of the world. We contacted our municipality and school at home. It seemed that there were no killer criteria for an extended trip. There would have been ways to handle everything.

We would have left the Westindies during the first half of February. Our routing schedule was Martinique – Bonaire – Columbia – Panama (channel crossing) – Marquesas – Tahiti – Cook Islands – Fiji – Australia. We would have arrived in Sydney in late October 2018. The idea was to sell the boat there.

Our heads were deep in these questions since Grenada. Saint Lucia just became the place where we would take a decision. We did, and we decided to turn back to Europe as per the original schedule.

The most practical reason why not to go was that we couldn’t answer one key question: How to take responsibility for the family during the loooong leg from Panama to the Marquesas in case of an extended period of unfavorable weather, and one adult being down with a major thickness of injury? That leg is enormously 3’750 nautical miles long, almost 7’000 kilometers. Our standard traveling time would have been 27 days, easily 35 with low winds, perhaps again considerably more in a state of emergency.

That trip is absolutely doable and hundreds of private yachts are doing it every year, amongst them also friends of us from our Atlantic crossing. There were days where we were totally convinced that we should do it. On the next day our internal indicators pointed into the opposite direction. We gave ourselves the time to narrow down on this outstandingly great question. Towards the end we involved family and some friends. Finally we found a solid conclusion which is the right one for us. So, we intend to be back in Switzerland around July, 2018.

That is our season review about Saint Lucia. What about the island itself? We simply don’t know. There were other priorities which took most of our time.

Grenada welcomed us with one of the better sailing days when cruising down their open ocean coasts with nice winds and almost no waves. We soon parked Yuana in the Marina of the Hotel Resort http://www.LePhareBleu.com

Le Phare Bleu is a Swiss owned and operated boutique hotel and marina, with all facilities open to the sailors as well. The name relates to the Swedish lighthouse ship which serves as their landmark, as a breakfast and music place, and which also houses some showers for the marina guests. This was our starting place to explore Grenada.

We arranged for a couple of onshore family runs, together with our friends from Mirabella, Kisu or Magellan. The rain forest refused us: loads of mud and flooded trails made it impossible to hike. We decided to give up and turn back after one hour, one kilometer and full of dirt. At least, we found some monkeys and waterfalls accessible by car which gave us an impression how it looks inside the jungle.

Our drivers stopped several time along the narrow and steep roads to show us trees where banana, mango, papaya, coconut, passion fruit, grape fruit, sorrel and other more exotic things grow. We also liked to learn where cloves grow and how cinnamon is produced.

Nutmegs are a chapter for itself, as the edible nut is packed in a triple shell, here described inside-our: Shell number one is very thin and hard and opens with a nut cracker. Shell number two is a fancy looking red netting called ‘mace’. It is the most precious part and used for flavoring of beverages or as a fragrance. The outermost shell finally is a thick cover comparable to a chestnut over in Europe.

The various fruits and spices amazed us and the kids. The kids favorite however was the chocolate factory, and inside the factory particularly the place where the products could be tasted. We bought a 1kg chocolate bar which shall soon give us a nice chocolate fondue. Hope nobody will die from the sugar flash.

Sure we were at the dinghy concert which was given on a raft in our bay. It was like on the street parade in Zurich, just with one stationary love mobile only and much better music. A small crowd of 300 gathered there to hang out on the water with friends, having a couple of drinks and enjoying great local sounds from the stage.

Visiting Grenada unveiled also some aspects where some might need to get used to. We want to write about this because we found it to be a part of their country or culture:
– Staff in a restaurant sometimes seem to be quite hesitating about serving customers. So we just grabbed the menu from the front desk and met the waitress at the bar for placing orders and paying the bill.
– Roads are very small. A safe driver won’t bring you farther than 30 kilometers in one hour. The hundreds of car wrecks rotting along the roads tell sad stories about the unsafe drivers.
– Locals pay no income tax. The state makes its money with import taxes only. The is a 150% surcharge on cars and 50% for the goods bought at the ship chandler where a lady used 5 minutes to bring a hand written invoice up to shape for me. Efficient?
– Many business potentials seem to be wasted without taking the chance to materialize them. Why isn’t the nutmeg place proudly serving cakes and drinks flavored with their products? Perhaps because they are proud that they haven’t changed their factory since the early days 50 years ago.
– The post system is dead slow. Still after three weeks, our new flag didn’t arrive and we had to leave without it. Too bad!

Still, do it as we did and visit this beautiful island! It‘s definitely worth it!

Imagine you manage a big business and earn millions of Euros or US Dollars a year. Your family owns one of the larger properties in the area with every amenity one can think of. You have seen all fancy holiday places in the world and the options for enjoying the few days off get thinner. Now you are planning the next holidays:

Your youngsters shall top any holiday experiences when being back at boarding school. Your wife is sure that she deserves top notch. You may have to welcome partners but need no spotters. So you should go super-yachting the West Indies for a week or two!

Charter a motor yacht to get started on the water. The even longer sailing yacht will top the experience in the following season. There is no reason to worry about the handling of all the equipment there anyway. The ship will come with a well experienced team of six who takes care of all vessel operations and also the toys on board.

The kids will love the 30 meter slide from the top deck into the sea. Give them the seabob, then the waverunner and finally the jetovator, just to raise the fun over the days. The cinema’s sound will beat all expectations anyway.

Your wife will be happy with the first class spa and gym, and she will definitely be proud when showing the inescapable evening guests around the upper deck lounge, the dining room, and finally their bedrooms with own bubble pool. For yourself and to make it short, there will be no gourmet issue this time and the box of properly sorted cigars will be appreciated.

So why is Yuana.life writing about this? Because those guys are our neighbors every here and there. They pay perhaps half a million in hard currency per week, but they can’t book the nicest sandy snorkeling bays for themselves. So comes we meet with them when arriving same time on Sandy Island (Carriacou, Grenada), as it happened just two days ago.

Whereas we beach our dinghy with 4 horsepower outboard engine, their shore landing vessel comes with 3 outboard engines of 350 horsepower each, so 1.050 horsepower in total, just to enjoy the number. Sure two of their crew would have prepared the beach chairs, umbrellas and drink coolers under the palms, before Gentlemen, Madam and kids are safely brought to the island. When the sun isn’t too far from going down, the society changes to the fatboy lamzac’s which now form a lounge on the white sands, and the little shore party would go on. Comfort and Style.

When we bump into each other on our stroll along the lonely beach, everyone is perfectly sure that the other ones are just here to enjoy the their life. Some have an eye on the toys of the other ones, and the other ones would love to be back at work only after another couple of weeks or even month in Paradise. So we just nod heads and take a glimpse of each other, and everyone goes his way. When we sit in our slow-motion dinghy for motoring back to Yuana, we can be sure we would arrive there with salty wet buttocks, from the waves spilling over the pontoons of our little rubber boat.